It’s Mother’s Day. Hopefully all of you mothers out there enjoyed a relaxing day—a hot shower, a homemade breakfast, some tea or coffee, and some help with the laundry. We think every mother should, including mothers in the developing world.
Fetching water in Africa takes women an average of 3 hours a day, with household chores related to washing, cooking and cleaning totaling their water related tasks to 8 hours a day.
In Uganda, only 4% of the population has water piped to their homes. We are responding by giving water access to a community in need through digging two wells. In the community where we work, life is about to dramatically improve--especially for mothers.
In Uganda, women are the major water collectors, users and managers of water in their households and are the major promoters of household and community sanitation activities. The typical woman in Africa spends 8 hours each day fetching water and doing water-related chores. The physical stress of getting water is almost exclusively put on women, who daily carry 44 pounds of it on their heads and backs.
While we are humbled by their work, we also don’t think that any human being should have to work this hard for something that God gave, and we can harness to make life easier. Would you want your mother, or your kids’ mother, spending that much of her life… on water?
Cissy, mother of 6, will be one of the beneficients of this well. Along with mothering, Cissy oversees our animal husbandry project.
As an organization, we’ve already invested years into making the most of what water was available. We have done water testing and filtration in the area, taught locals how to purify their water, constructed multiple water catchment cisterns and trained well repairmen. The Lord, along with all of these efforts, has sustained our East African community for some time. But we’ve always wanted to do more than sustain, more than survive. We are working hard to create an environment where people can thrive, especially the mothers.
For that reason, we are installing two wells.
One well will be primarily for agricultural use, irrigating nearly 200 double-dug garden beds, and the families of the farmers on that land. This well will not only meet the need of water scarcity for a community of families, but also food production and availability.
The other well will give the 400 children at St. John’s school access to drinking water as well as water for their school garden.
Josephine (above) and Annette (below) will benefit from the well--as mothers as well as teachers at St. John's Primary. Josephine and Annette often ask for prayer for their students who struggle to focus due to hunger and thirst.
These two wells will make life livable for mothers in Uganda. Their days will no longer be dominated by just obtaining water. In Africa, cutting the time spent on fetching water by just 15 minutes can reduce the incidence of diarrhea by 41%, and the under 5 mortality rate by 11%. But we are cutting the time spent on fetching water by far more than 15 minutes—we’re cutting it by an hour!
To implement this much anticipated project, we are sending Josh Kurtz (water specialist and project manager), Cameron Kagay (Director of G.O.D. East Africa), and Geoff Hartnell (agriculture specialist) to Uganda to see the project through. They will work with Francis Lubega, the project foreman, on the ground. During their trip, they will install both wells and 2,500 feet of water distribution pipe to get the water where it needs to go. Their wives couldn’t ask for a better gift for Mother’s Day than securing water for other women.
To help us achieve these goals, and move quickly through our phases of piping water to farmland, homes, and a school, please see our NuWaterWorks page.
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